by Tng Ying Hui
In February 2003, FFTH kicked off its first food distribution programme. No less than 114 routes were planned to collect unsold bread from bakeries for distribution to welfare homes. “We worked like maniacs and had a lot of enthusiastic volunteers helping,” said Christine
In May 2003, FFTH collaborated with the Residents’ Committee in Henderson estate and piloted a self-collection programme to distribute bread to needy residents, or those from households whose per capita income was below $200 a month. A month later, it set up its first self-collection centre at Marine Parade. Fourteen volunteers gathered once a week at the centre to pack bread and non-perishables for the poor. Most of the food was donated through food drives conducted at schools, with hotels, bakeries and supermarkets also providing supplies.
Later on, FFTH also set up self-collection centres in other areas like King George’s Avenue, Jalan Besar, Redhill, Pasir Ris and Nee Soon. Christine enjoyed visiting these centres to meet the volunteers and beneficiaries. “There would be happy tears on these families’ faces, appreciating that someone hadn’t forgotten about them,” she said. FFTH nearly put up the shutters in 2005 as Christine had difficulty paying for the operations. With donations from the President’s Challenge fundraising event and sponsors from NTUC FairPrice, FFTH managed to narrow its deficit.
By 2011, FFTH had 2,000 volunteers, of whom 400 had stayed with them since the beginning, collecting leftover bread from bakeries, hotels and restaurants for distribution to about 8,000 underprivileged individuals each month. Christine said, “We never dreamt that Food from the Heart would become so big. All we wanted to do was save the bread from the incinerator.”
In 2011, the Laimers returned to Austria to take over their family business. Before their departure, Christine received a “very touching and unforgettable” text from a volunteer whom she had recruited in 2002. The text message read, “Don’t worry about FFTH, I promise that I will stay on my bread collection route as long as I shall live!” Said Christine, “This is but one example of the volunteers’ dedication.” She handed over her “baby” to her successors Anson Quek and Ronald Stride, who still run FFTH. “It was a very difficult decision for me,” she said. She still closely follows the activities of FFTH, and looks forward to telling its story to Mercedes, who is now a teenager. Christine said she is “extremely happy” that FFTH is thriving today because of how much she has invested in the organisation. She humbly credits FFTH’s success to her successors.
References
Alexandra Kohut-Cole, “Heeding the call,” accessed June 2015,
http://www.alexandrakohutcole.com/uploads/1/3/5/2/13528844/christine_laimer.pdf
Food From The Heart, 2014 Annual Report, accessed June 2015,
https://foodheart.org/annual_reports_financial_information
Jennani Durai, “Charity founders leaving Singapore,” The Straits Times, November 3 2011.
Mabel Chou, Keng Leong Lee, Chung Piaw Teo and Huan Zheng, “Food from the Heart: Delievering Leftover Bread in Singapore,” National University of Singapore, accessed June 2015, http://bschool.nus.edu/Staff/bizteocp/FFTHcase.pdf
“Mission and History,” Food From the Heart, accessed June 2015,
https://foodheart.org/mission_history
Theresa Tan, “NCSS Concerned Over Possible Conflict of Interest,” The Straits Times,
December 7, 2006.
Victoria Vaughan, “Food from the Heart for the Needy,” The Straits Times, February 8, 2010.
“Worth More Than its Weight in Dough,” The Straits Times, November 24, 2004.
Interview with Christine Laimer in June 2015.
Christine Laimer
Austria, b.1961
Krystyn Olszewski
Transformer: My Name is Olszewski
Polish architect and town planner Krystyn Olszewski came to Singapore in 1968 with a United Nations mission. By the time he left, he had helped transform Singapore’s urban landscape from Third World to First.
From a bird’s eye view, one would notice that self-contained and inter-connected residential communities surround Singapore’s central catchment nature reserve in the centre of the island. The Singapore Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari recreational parks are also there. This “ring” idea was the brainchild of Krystyn Olszewski, who was the chief designer of Singapore’s first concept plan. In 1968, Olszewski came to Singapore with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He stayed for five years but returned to Singapore in 1978. His second stint lasted 13 years. To his Singaporean colleagues who struggled to pronounce his name, Olszewski would tell them, “Say, ‘all-chefs-ski’.”
Born in 1921, Olszewski was 18 when Nazi troops occupied Poland. He attended clandestine education groups to pursue his interest in architecture. He also joined the Polish underground but was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Pawiak Prison, Auschwitz and other concentration camps in Germany. At Auschwitz, he was sentenced to death three times but escaped each time. Eventually, he was liberated from the concentration camp in Dachau in May 1945 by American forces. After his release, Olszewski and his two friends published a book titled We Were in Auschwitz detailing the suffering they had undergone in the Nazi camps. He pursued architecture studies at Warsaw Technical University and graduated with a master’s degree.
Olszewski was the chief designer of Singapore’s Comprehensive Long-Term Concept Plan. The concept plan—nicknamed the “Ring” plan for its shape—guided Singapore’s physical development for the next 20 years. According to the plan, high-density satellite towns would encircle the central water catchment area. These towns across the island would be linked to the Central Business District by interconnecting expressways and a mass rapid transit system.
The plan also included a proposal for a new international airport—Changi Airport—to cope with high air traffic in the future. In a 1972 The Straits Times interview, Olszewski explained that, “Paya Lebar could not be the main international airport as it was too close to the city and enlarging it would cause noise pollution.” He also suggested a new traffic arrangement in the city centre: special pedestrian lanes and areas, and a rail-based mass rapid transit system. At the same time, he urged the government to preserve parts of Chinatown and to retain the liveliness of the Singapore River area even as it focused on urban planning to support the country’s economic ambitions. Henry Wardlaw, head of the UNDP mission then, said in a 2013 interview with the Centre for Liveable Cities: “At that point, the government’s main focus was on providing employment, which meant that a Concept Plan conducive to the economy was key.”
Olszewski left Singapore in 1973 when the UNDP project was completed. Five years later, when offered a job by the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, he returned here as a consultant to the government, designing golf courses and international exhibition venues. In 1981, he became a planning consultant with the Jurong Town Corporation and designed the master plan for the Singapore Science Park in Kent Ridge. To establish how big the Science Park should be, Olszewski spent “considerable time” assessing how many science graduates NUS and NTU would produce, said Vice-President of Planning at Jurong Consultants Seetoh Kum Chun, who was a junior planner who worked with Olszewski in the 1980s. Olszewski, a nature lover, also wanted to retain the original hilly topography and 30% of the green open spaces and preserve the trees in the area when developing the science park masterplan. This was a novel suggestion as the prevailing thinking at that time was to maximise land use.
Subsequently, Olszewski was involved in the architectural design of MRT stations. Singapore’s first MRT service was launched in 1987, bringing to fruition what Olszewski had proposed in the first Concept Plan 16 years earlier.
During the period he was here, Olszewski found fulfilment in transforming Singapore’s urban landscape into one that reflected its journey from Third World to First. He told his elder son, Piotr, “It is the greatest dream of an architect or a town planner, to draw designs on paper in the evening, and to see them materialise
in front of your eyes in the morning.” In his last three years in Singapore, Olszewski was a consultant to countries in the region which were embarking on urbanisation projects. He moved back to Poland in 1991 at the age of 70 and stopped working then to care for his wife, who was ill. Olszewski died in 2004. His family members described him as “attentive, caring and completely dedicated.”
References
“Interview with Mr Henry Wardlaw,” Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series, October 18, 2013, http://www.clc.gov.sg/documents/books/CLC_interview_with_Mr_Henry_Wardlaw.pdf
Tan Wang Joo, “Changi the Best Says Expert,” The Straits Times, April 9, 1971.
Zenon Kosiniak-kamysz, “The Story of a Polish Architect,” The Straits Times, 27 December, 2014.
Interviews with Seetoh Kum Chun and Piotr Olszewski over email in May and June 2015 respectively.
Biographical materials sourced from Olszewski’s family via Kryczka Katarzyna,
Press and Information Officer from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland to Singapore.
Krystyn Olszewski
Poland, 1921-2004
G. G. Thomson
Attuning the Civil Service to New Times
Former Briton George Gray Thomson headed the Political Study Centre from 1959 to 1969, and trained Singapore’s first generation of post-colonial civil servants.
In 1959, after more than a century of colonial rule, Singapore was granted self-government. After the PAP swept to power in the May 1959 Legislative Assembly election, the government formed a Political Study Centre. Its aim was to reorient the mindset of civil servants—who had been used to serving the British—to help PAP leaders build a new social order to ensure Singapore’s survival.
George Gray Thomson was chosen by the government to head the centre. According to then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who wrote this of Thomson in his memoir The Singapore Story, “He had a good mind, was well-read, and was an earnest speaker”. Thomson, who held a Master of Arts degree from Oxford, started working in Singapore in 1945 as the deputy director of the British administration’s Publicity and Printing Department. After the department changed its name to the Department of Public Relations a year later, Thomson became the government’s public relations officer.
In 1957, he gave up his UK citizenship and became a citizen under the Singapore Citizenship Ordinance, which offered Singapore citizenship to British citizens who had resided in Singapore for at least two years, along with those who had been born in Singapore or Malaya. Though he never explained explicitly why he had put down roots here, his son, Alexander Thomson, said in a 1979 interview with The Straits Times, "[My father] had an extraordinary imagination—Singapore gripped his imagination when he thought of what could be done.”
The Political Study Centre at Number 4 Goodwood Hill conducted programmes to apprise senior civil servants of the communist threat in Southeast Asia, the political changes in Singapore and the urgency of getting economic development underway. During the courses, civil servants discussed international trends and Singapore’s position in the world. In the early years, the focus was on Europe and the United States, and later it shifted to Singapore’s position in Southeast Asia. In these classes, Thomson assessed domestic politics in the Southeast Asian countries. After lessons, ministers would stop by the centre sometimes to gather feedback from the civil servants about how things were run in the country. The establishment of the Political Study Centre was not without controversy. British civil servants felt that it was demeaning to attend courses taught by locals. Gerald de Cruz, Thomson’s deputy and a permanent lecturer at the centre, recalled in an oral history interview in 1981, “To think that our own Singapore people had anything to teach them, they found that extremely difficult to swallow, except for one or two among them.” Another debate arose as to whether the lecturers were meant to influence civil servants to support the PAP.
At a December 1960 Assembly sitting, A. P. Rajah, Member of Parliament for Farrer Park, remarked, “Some of the lecturers, tutors or whoever may be, perhaps without the knowledge of the Minister, do adopt a line which quite blatantly praises the party in power and quite openly runs down the other political parties in Singapore.” Then-Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam countered that assertion with the comment that one of the aims of the Political Study Centre was “to provide the Ministers with an opportunity to get ordinary members of the civil [service] to be critical. Very often they are very critical of Government policy”.
The appointment of Thomson as head of the centre also drew comments, even though he was a Singaporean. There were questions of whether he was working for the MI5, Britain’s secret service. Former Chief Minister David Marshall said in his oral history interview in 1984, “[Thomson] may have well been entrusted with the job of seeing that there was stability in Singapore and that the British were kept informed of all relevant matters that affected the security [of the] colony.”
Thomson persisted in what he had been tasked to do. And he did it well. His lessons on various aspects of politics, such as “The Evolution from Colony to Nations”, “The Civil Servant in a Changing World” and “The Communist Challenge”, became so popular that he received requests to carry out courses for principals of local English schools and civil servants from other territories of Malaysia. From 1962 to 1964, he ran five courses in Kuching, two in Sibu and one in Jesselton, now known as Kota Kinabalu. The courses in Kuching were attended by 36 officers of the Sarawak state government. In a radio talk in 1966, he pointed out that Singapore’s survival depended on more than just winning battles. “It is axiomatic that the prime purpose of any foreign policy is to ensure survival […] Survival is not merely life distinct from death. It is survival in as great security as possible and with as high a standard of living as possible, in order that we can develop our own way of life from our own nature, enriched by our own experience.” Thomson headed the Political Study Centre for 10 years until it was closed in 1969.
Thomson was then assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as deputy secretary for training and research. He stepped down in 1971. As an advocate of heritage preservation, Thomson regularly wrote to the press and emphasised in his letters that modernisation should not destroy heritage. In 1971, he argued that a proportion of Singapore's income should be set aside for the preservation of historic buildings, like those in Chinatown, and for sights by the Singapore River. Today, both areas have been simultaneously conserved and adapted for commercial use. Thomson was deeply involved with many aspects of life in Singapore. Before his death in 1979, he was part of at least 30 societies and organisations and was well-respected by the civil service and welfare groups.
References
David Marshall, interviewed by Mrs Lily Tan, August 16, 2015, accession number 000156/08, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.
Gerald De Cruz interviewed by Miss Foo Kim Leng, September 23, 1981, accession number 000105/12, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.
Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew
(Singapore: The Straits Times Press, 1998).
Nancy Chng, “A man Who Identified Himself Totally With the S’pore Experience,”
The Straits Times, July 27, 1979.
Parliament of Singapore, “Annual Estimates of Expenditure for Public Services and Development Estimates for 1961,” December 12, 1960.
Parliament of Singapore, “Budget, Ministry of Finance,” 16 November, 1964.
“Son Flies out for Thomson’s funeral,” The Straits Times, July 24, 1979.
G G Thomson
United Kingdom, 1902-1979
Bruno Wildermuth
Putting Singapore On the Right Track
Swiss national and Singapore Permanent Resident Bruno Wildermuth is a key figure behind Singapore’s MRT system. He also established the world’s first integrated ticketing system in Singapore.
The transport situation in Singapore in its early days of independence
was haphazard. In the 1960s and early 1970s, buses were slow and broke down often, while pirate taxis plied the streets. From 1968 onwards, new roads were built and the bus companies were reorganised and merged into a single entity, Singapore Bus Service (SBS). Planning for longer-term transport infrastructure began around that time. But the government was still divided over whether to stump up significant investment to build an MRT as there were competing demands from public housing and Changi Airport.
In 1972, the government and the World Bank invited transport planner Bruno Wildermuth and his colleagues from transport and infrastructure consultancy Wilbur Smith and Associates to study the feasibility of a high-speed mass transit system for Singapore. The firm had recommended a billion-dollar islandwide rail system as the backbone of Singapore’s public transport network. Assessments thereafter concluded that it would cost a massive $5 billion. Buses could feed the areas beyond the rail network, said Wilbur Smith in its report. But the report made clear that this view was unconventional. The World Bank, in reviewing the report, was not convinced and concluded that the bus-rail system it had proposed would be “uneconomical”.
An intense debate on the MRT system took place in Parliament and ended inconclusively, so a team from Harvard University was brought in to review Wilbur Smith’s findings and recommendations. The Harvard team agreed with the World Bank and concluded in its review that “the case for building an MRT is not compelling”. A restructured all-bus system was the way to go, it said.